No is a full sentence. I use it early. I use it often. I do not trade peace for proximity, status, or someone else’s comfort.
My boundaries are not suggestions. They are gates I own the keys to. If a room tries to reduce me, I leave. If a conversation poisons the air, I log off. If a relationship starves my soul, I choose distance and keep moving.
What you see is what you get. My core does not shift to fit a crowd. I show up aligned. I show up consistent. I show up myself.
I dress the part. I act the part. I take up space on purpose. Your discomfort is not my problem. My presence is not an apology.
Keep your negativity parked outside; it will be towed. I do not host drama, rumor, or the echo of he said she said. I am busy building a life with meaning. Every yes is paid for with time.
I am in competition with my last draft, my last habit, my last excuse. I study. I pivot. I grow. I improve because I refuse to stay small. Self-pity is a trap I do not step in. Blame is a mirror I do not hold.
Your opinion is not my oxygen. Your whispers do not move me. I am guided by conviction, not chatter. By vision, not noise. I live at a higher frequency; static gets cut.
If you mistake kindness for access, you will be corrected. If you test my boundaries, you will meet the gate. If you bring peace, purpose, or truth, you will find a seat at my table.
Know the rules before your bias speaks for you. This is my life. My time. My energy. I am one hundred percent authentic, and I plan to stay that way.
I am in the process of finishing up Mel Robbins’ book The Let Them Theory and let me tell you, I’ve never identified with something this deeply. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been learning how to let them, to let people think what they think, do what they do, and reveal who they truly are without letting it shake me. It’s been a lesson in release, in protecting my peace without explanation.
I’ve had to remind myself that not everyone will understand my growth, my silence, or my boundaries. And that’s okay. Let them misunderstand. Let them drift. Let them choose differently. Because every time I’ve stopped trying to control the outcome, I’ve found more of myself waiting on the other side.
It’s freeing, really. To stop chasing closure or clarity and start choosing calm. To let life unfold as it should, without forcing what isn’t meant to stay. That’s the beauty of letting them, it’s not about indifference; it’s about reclaiming your power and giving yourself permission to rise unbothered.
Let Them!
Two simple words that unravel everything you thought you had to control.
This isn’t just a theory, it’s a practice. A quiet revolution. The art of release. It’s learning to stop gripping people so tightly that you lose your own pulse. It’s giving others the freedom to show you who they are and giving yourself the grace to believe them.
Let them talk. Let them leave. Let them misunderstand you. Let them think you’ve changed. Because maybe you have, and maybe that’s the point.
The Let Them Theory is a lesson in power. Not the kind you flex, but the kind you protect. It teaches you that peace isn’t found in trying to be chosen, it’s found in choosing yourself again and again, even when it costs you comfort.
It’s about learning to stand still while the world spins with noise and judgment and realizing you don’t have to prove your worth by chasing what keeps slipping away. You just let them, and in doing so, you let yourself be.
This is a book you don’t just read; you live. You breathe it in the moments you bite your tongue instead of explaining yourself. You feel it when you stop over-giving. You embody it the day you stop begging for peace and start being peace.
It’s a guide for the soft-hearted, the overthinkers, the ones who love deeply and are finally learning that love without boundaries is self-betrayal. It’s not a story of detachment; it’s the story of reclamation.
Because when you let them, you let go of the illusion of control and step into the quiet truth of who you are: whole, grounded, and free.
This poem is my reminder, that letting go isn’t weakness, it’s wisdom. It’s peace wearing armor. It’s the freedom to stand in who I am without needing permission or validation.
Let Them!
by Paragonwords
Let them talk. Let them twist your name into stories they were never brave enough to live. Let them misunderstand your silence, your softness, your distance.
Let them.
Let them fall away like leaves that were never meant to survive the winter. You are not obligated to chase what detaches itself. You are not required to bleed for closure. Peace does not demand witnesses, only surrender.
Let them choose someone else. Let them forget your worth until the echo of you haunts their better judgment. Let them walk into rooms that used to hold your laughter and feel the hollowness of what they took for granted.
Let them go. Even when your hands ache from release. Even when your heart begs to run after what broke it. Let them.
Because you cannot carry people who crave their own destruction. You cannot beg for presence from those addicted to your absence. You cannot be light in the house of someone who worships shadow.
So let them! drift, vanish, betray, distance, disappear. Let them teach you what your boundaries could never say aloud.
And when the noise fades, when the silence finally becomes familiar, you will hear the truth whisper, they were never yours to keep.
You will breathe differently. Stand taller. Move through rooms without explaining your worth.
Because what leaves was never love. What stays! what remains when everything else falls away, is you.
Still here. Still whole. Still choosing peace over permission.
When was the last time you truly raised your standards?
Paragonwords
Not in theory. Not in talk. But in the quiet corners of your life where comfort hides and mediocrity whispers stay right here.
So many people wonder why they feel drained, uninspired, or trapped in the same patterns year after year.
It’s because they’ve built a home inside their own limitations, surrounded by people who think small, dream small, and live small.
We blame circumstances, timing, exhaustion… but the truth is simpler:
We’ve stopped expecting more from ourselves.
Raising your standards is not glamorous.
It means letting go of people who no longer fit your growth.
It means having hard conversations with yourself about the energy you tolerate, the distractions you feed, and the voices you allow to echo in your mind.
It means outgrowing environments that reward your silence and resent your ambition.
Paragonwords
If your life feels like a loop, the same arguments, the same heartbreaks, the same frustrations, it’s not fate. It’s repetition. It’s a mirror showing you that you’ve outgrown the version of yourself still trying to make peace with the bare minimum.
You are not meant to live stuck in cycles that drain your brilliance.
You are meant to rise.
And rising requires standards, higher ones, sharper ones, unwavering ones.
One thing I’ve learned in life is this, I cannot build my opinion of someone based on what other people say about them. Whispers are slippery. Stories get bent out of shape. And sometimes what people project onto others has more to do with their own bias than with truth.
That’s why I always choose to give people the benefit of the doubt.
When I meet someone, I give them space to prove who they are. I ask myself, is what I heard true? Was it exaggerated? Was it taken out of context? Or did someone use their own unconscious bias to create a version of this person that isn’t real?
For me, nothing tells the story more clearly than how someone shows up in their daily life, through their actions, their choices, and most importantly, the way they treat people. That’s where their real character reveals itself.
But here’s the part where I stand firm, the moment you prove that the warnings were true, the moment your behavior confirms the very things people told me to watch out for, that’s the moment I walk away. No hesitation. No second guessing.
I refused to stay in toxic environments, around toxic people once they reveal their true self and I can see it with my own eyes. Toxicity is contagious, negativity breathes conformity and small-minded people always reveal themselves in the end.
Because here’s the truth, one person can be wrong. Two people can exaggerate, but when multiple voices start to align and my own experience confirms the pattern, that tells me everything I need to know. At that point, I don’t need more stories or explanations. I’ve seen enough for myself.
And so, I choose both, grace in the beginning, and boundaries in the end.
I want to know who you really are, not just who others say you are. But once you show me your true self, I believe you, and I adjust my place in your life accordingly.
That balance keeps me grounded. It keeps me from judging unfairly, and it keeps me from staying in spaces where I don’t belong.
It’s never your friends, the organization or the majority that’s toxic; Most times it’s the people entrusted to lead, who forgot that power and trust is a privilege, not a weapon to use against others.
Until next time! Take care of your hearts my darlings!
I wrote this piece as a declaration and a reckoning. As a poet and writer, my work is born from the ache, from the moments I was voiceless, the years I was shrinking, the fire I kept swallowing to keep the peace.
Writing became my rebellion and my revival.
This poem is not just about being a writer, it’s about what it costs to tell the truth. It’s about carrying stories in your bones and deciding to bleed them onto the page anyway. It’s about being a woman, a survivor, an artist, someone who feels deeply and dares to make beauty from the breaking.
I wanted to remind myself, and anyone who reads it, that we don’t write because it’s pretty, we write because it’s necessary. Because silence was never meant to be our legacy.
This is the language I carry beneath my skin. This is the fire I refuse to bury.
Every word is a bone I’ve dug from the dirt of my past.
A fossil from a life I lived in silence, now resurrected in ink. I am both the archaeologist and the artifact.
The buried truth and the one brave enough to name it.
Poetry didn’t save me. It demanded I show up, bloodied, honest, and cracked wide open.
Sometimes I write with grace. Other times I write with rage. But always, I write with reverence.
Because there’s something holy about surviving with your voice intact. There’s something sacred about letting your pain bloom into art. And there is nothing more courageous than telling the truth
In a world that profits from your silence.
So, if you ask me what I do, I will not say I am just a poet. I will say! I am a Firestarter. A soul excavator. A keeper of stories too wild for cages.
And if my words ever burn, let them. Some things are meant to set you free.
As writers, we are often tasked with capturing the complexities of life, the moments of stillness, the bursts of inspiration, and the deep, often unsettling shifts that come with change. But perhaps the most difficult transformation to capture is the one that happens within ourselves.
Change is a universal experience, but it is also deeply personal. Whether it’s a shift in perspective, a loss of identity, or the quiet shedding of the old to make room for the new, writing offers us a way to reflect, process, and embrace the transformations that shape us.
This week, I’ve been reflecting on the theme of change in my own writing. I wrote a poem called “The Quiet Work of Becoming,” which explores the slow, quiet transformation we undergo throughout our lives. I found that writing about change allowed me to not only understand the shifting landscape of my own journey but also to celebrate the beauty in it.
Through the process of writing, we become more aware of how change, no matter how subtle, has shaped us. Writing gives us the space to look back at the chapters we’ve outgrown, and at the same time, it empowers us to step boldly into the unknown.
When you sit down to write about change, don’t be afraid to dive into the messy, uncomfortable parts. Don’t rush through the discomfort. Embrace it. Because it’s in that very discomfort that growth happens. It’s in the stretching, the breaking, the reshaping, that our most honest work can emerge.
So, to all my fellow writers out there, what transformations are you going through right now? How are you capturing the changes in your own work?
Let’s continue writing through our becoming. Together, we can build something beautiful from the moments that shift us.
“The Quiet Work of Becoming”
There is no ceremony in the shift, no fanfare to mark the moment when the soil starts to stir inside of you. It is not a grand unfolding, but a small, steady erosion, as if the earth has always been waiting beneath the surface to release something new.
You do not know when the change begins, a bruise that deepens over time, a knot worked loose in the night by your own hands. The old skin sloughs away without a sound, a quiet rebellion against the life that once fit you.
The ache of it is not dramatic, it does not scream in neon colors, but lingers like a forgotten word on the edge of your tongue. Some days you wake and realize you are no longer the same, but you can’t say when or why or how you left behind the version that was.
No one tells you that becoming does not happen in leaps, but in a thousand small steps, each one so small you think it couldn’t possibly matter, and yet. look at the distance.
You are not the person you were yesterday, and yet, when you look closely, you can still see the traces of who you used to be, woven into the spaces between what you have learned and what you are still learning.
It happens in the spaces no one watches, the work you do without audience or applause. And when you finally look up, you realize: you have always been becoming something else, not better, not worse, just different. Just finally, you.
“Grief is the echo of love, a reminder that our bonds are eternal”
Welcome to The Grief Keeper Journal, a sanctuary for your emotions, and a companion through the journey of loss. This journal is more than a collection of pages; it’s a haven designed to hold your grief, your thoughts, and your healing process.
The Grief Keeper is uniquely yours. Every tear-stained page, every colored illustration, and every written word is a step towards understanding and accepting your grief. Use this journal as a trusted friend, a silent witness to your pain, and a gentle guide towards healing. Remember, this journey is not yours alone, this grief journal is here to accompany you every step of the way. Allow it to be a safe space where you can confront, explore, and ultimately, give your grief the tenderness it deserves.
Blessings! Nikki Sterling @paragonwords Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads and BookBub 💗
Paragonwords 